


Ante-Post

by Eloisa, The_Casual_Sounds (the_casual_cheesecake)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Natasha Romanov, Community: pod_together, Gen, POV Steve Rogers, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Available, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-09-19 01:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20322571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisa/pseuds/Eloisa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/pseuds/The_Casual_Sounds
Summary: Five ex-Avengers, one Ford Transit van, and an urgent need to stage a getaway.





	Ante-Post

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set a few weeks after Steve Rogers stages the Raft breakout at the end of Civil War, though before Scott Lang gives himself up for house arrest. I have always assumed that Natasha was Steve’s quartermaster and rearguard on the Raft mission.

[Podfic by The_Casual_Cheesecake](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ywUc9dpf051c6fL1zCluZOXvWaFIUjBu)

“Should have gone with Clint, should have gone with Clint…” Scott’s voice rumbled from the back of the Ford Transit.

Natasha craned her head round the back of the driver’s seat. “Will you be quiet?”

“Watch the road!” Sam yelped. Steve, tucked in behind Natasha, said nothing. Praying a Hail Mary right now would seem terribly rude.

Life for him had long been a series of befores and afters. Maybe that was true of everyone, but his felt heavy and filled with import, something he’d come to consider marker posts in his mission. Before the serum: after. Before wartime service, before his icy flight: after. Before the Avengers: after.

Before the Sokovia Accords. After.

Before and after springing Clint Barton, Scott Lang, Wanda Maximoff and Sam Wilson from the Raft prison was a logical extension. Clint had – with a final kiss for Natasha – left the fugitive group soon afterwards, heading home. The remaining five ex-Avengers had jumped a transatlantic cargo ship at the Red Hook Container Terminal. Its largely Wakandan crew had proved experts at putting on confused faces for the US Marshals searching for their escaped prisoners, though had turfed the five escapees ashore at Rotterdam.

A new continent. A new start. A chance of freedom.

A suspicious grubby group gathered around a shipping container in that same massive port: a cargo of Chitauri weapons carried out past a customs inspector happily counting his bribe: Steve deliberately attracting harbour police attention in time to draw them to the illegal, and highly dangerous, weapons import…

Stopping that import from being released into Europe had refilled Steve’s sense of purpose, sure enough, but that purposefulness buttered no parsnips when they were chased out of not just Rotterdam but the Netherlands by a conglomerate of police officers, Dutch soldiers, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and one or two HYDRA members. Now, on this darkening December afternoon, they were barrelling southwards down the French version of an interstate, in a purloined rusty Transit van, with a trio of French biker police, a car full of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and a UN observation vehicle not far behind them.

“What’s with the light show?” Scott asked, pointing to red beacons flashing over the freeway.

“Warned other drivers to get off the road,” Nat said. “Sam, status…”

“Closing,” Sam reported from his position at the van’s rear window. “Less than three clicks now.” Natasha’s response was a scrunched-up nose and another jab at the accelerator. This old van could move, definitely, but it didn’t have anywhere near the pace of the specialist cars following them.

Wanda, in the passenger seat beside Nat, flipped over another page of a road atlas – it had become clear before they’d left America that use of _any _cell phone or GPS instantly attracted someone or other in their direction. “We should turn off here towards Avignon and Marseilles,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll run out of _autoput_ – freeway.”

“Where’s the next toll station?”

“Past the Avignon junction, a few kilometres down the road…” Natasha accelerated again, past the tempting turn-off. Wanda muttered something that sounded suspiciously like the Hail Mary but in Sokovian. Steve mouthed the English wording.

Natasha half-turned her head towards Steve. “We lighten load. The carpet, any broken kit, the tool box – we can carry the tools – anything we can spare, pass it to Wanda to throw out of the window.” Steve turned round quickly enough to catch Scott and Sam pointing at each other with questioning looks on their faces. They meant nothing by it other than tension-lightening. Scott had done the first dose of wisecracking, but Sam had joined in shortly afterwards. A wisecracker couldn’t mope.

“Ha, ha,” Natasha said. “Scott, hands on the cash pouch.” He nodded to her. Scott had carried the vast majority of their ready cash from the start of their journey. He was a past master at spotting pickpockets.

Sam peered out of the back again. “Down to two clicks, I reckon. Nat, I hope you’re right about the road not taken.”

“So do I.” Heavier rain, mixed with snow, splattered onto the van’s windscreen. Natasha turned on the wipers. Steve, busy passing Wanda floor upholstery and the odd extraneous bit of bodywork to be thrown out of the window, saw the long curve of the freeway ahead end in a row of tiny huts stretching across the road, blocking it, all covered by a single long roof like it was a gas station in their way. It was the toll booths.

Sleet started to gust against the van as wind began to buffet. The road had been ploughed and salted, but the van’s rear wheels still wobbled, trying to skid.

Nat smiled at Steve in the rear view mirror. “We got this. Wanda?” Wanda paused halfway through disposing of most of Scott’s snack collection. “Could you melt some of this stuff?”

“Sure.” Her eyes began to glow, and then her fingertips, and then the road ahead. Steve held his breath.

The van’s giddiness eased. Natasha’s foot on the gas didn’t. “Scott,” she said, “give Wanda a twenty.”

“What currency?”

“Euros – I don’t care. Anything.”

Scott had the note out of the wallet and in Wanda’s grip before Steve realised that, along with the road being deserted, the toll booths were deserted.

And Nat was driving straight for the closest barrier.

“Brace,” he called backwards. Sam complied instantly, Scott almost as fast. Steve hugged the back of Natasha’s seat. Natasha crashed them through the toll barrier at eighty miles an hour. For a second or two the barrier gate remained lodged on their windscreen, but then it fell away, splintering onto the tarmac. The twenty-euro note fluttered out of Wanda’s window towards the toll gates, a drunken butterfly.

Sam rose, with some caution, and peered out of the rear window again. “They’ve stopped,” he reported. “How come?”

“The slush I melted,” Wanda said, eyes on her seatbelt.

“Uh-huh?”

“It re-froze.”

Nat caught Steve’s eye in the rear view mirror again. “They’d slowed up for the toll barriers. Gendarmerie might have got fussy if the S.H.I.E.L.D. car had broken one too.” She half-shrugged. “That twenty should do for covering the damaged barrier as well as our toll.”

“Should have gone with Clint,” Scott whispered in the background.

*

Ten minutes later, in thickening snow that caught on the Transit’s windscreen wipers and clumped on its hood, Natasha pulled over fifty yards from a used car dealership on Grenoble’s outskirts. It was half past six in the evening. The suburb was rumbling towards dinnertime, people clumping homewards through slush, cars edging along gritted streets. The sun was well below the horizon. Steve’s breath condensed in the air inside the van, memories of a Brooklyn winter.

“We can proceed in two ways,” he said to the others. “We can stay together, or we can split up. Together we have teamwork. Apart we are less obvious.”

“Two teams,” Natasha said. “One team plays bait, the other meanders round and escapes back north past pursuit. We meet up somewhere – I suggest the Piazza Castello in Turin. It’s not too far, and we get to tick off another country on our world tour.”

“Strength in numbers if we stick together,” Sam objected.

“Strength is not always enough,” Wanda countered. “Apart, if one group of us is captured, the other group can stage a surprise. I agree with Natalia. Two teams.”

Scott shrugged indifference, and looked to Steve, who nodded. “That’s the way we’ll play it. Natasha and I will be the bait. Scott, Sam and Wanda will escape northwards.” Sam nodded, albeit with some reluctance, and all five Avengers clasped hands.

Scott took out the money pouch again, halved its contents with a ripple and stuck one half into the van’s cup holder. At a gesture from Natasha, Steve, Wanda, Scott and Sam bailed out and onto the sidewalk. Nat drove off, into the car dealership and up to its office door. From this distance Steve couldn’t hear what she said to the salesman, who seemed particularly keen to stay inside his glass-fronted office in the warm rather than venturing into the car lot, but from her body language, she was playing a faithless man’s wife who needed to replace her last asset with a more practical winter drive.

Scott, meanwhile, sauntered away from the other three and walked past the car lot, head down and feet squelching in slush and snow. The salesman was fawning over Nat now. Scott waited till the parked Transit van was between him and the salesman, then hopped over the foot-high chainlink fence into the car lot, and wandered up to a small blue Fiat with cheery striped decals on its hood and a smiley face on its nose.

Scott didn’t speak French, but he didn’t have to.

Across the yard, Nat climbed into a four-wheel-drive Toyota SUV parked adjacent to the sales office and gave the salesman a delighted smile. Scott peeled off the Fiat’s decals and, still with the Transit as cover, cracked the door open and disappeared into its driver’s seat footwell.

Crash-bang-phut, Natasha failing to put the Toyota in gear, laughing a silly-little-woman laugh. Pop-pop, the Fiat’s engine turning over. Whisper-purr, Scott driving it hot-wired out of the dealership and into the night.

Sam and Wanda squeezed Steve’s arms and melted into the snowy evening. He waited, watching Natasha, watching her smile to the salesman – tired and fuzzy-headed after a long working day – watching her hand over a wad of cash. Moments later the black Toyota eased out of the sales yard, and round to Steve’s observation point. Natasha slowed without truly stopping. He cracked open the passenger door at a jog-trot, vaulted inside and nodded to her. She picked up speed with a nod to him.

“Yes, he overcharged the silly little woman. The van was worth much more in part-exchange than he pretended.”

Steve breathed a sigh of relief. “And Scott will…?”

“Find a nearby car hire firm, lift a set of rental papers, stickers and the like, and get Sam to falsify some paperwork to make it look as if the Fiat was a hire car. Wanda will drop the car off and ask for a replacement. It’s late in the day; nobody will cross-check until they’re well away. After two or three more swaps, no agency will be able to trace what car they’re in. Meanwhile, we’re driving a vehicle suspected of being involved in a crime, and the heat stays on us.

“So much changes, and so much stays the same.” He’d learnt that one, in French and English, from a Resistance maquisard a long time ago. “May I interest you in dinner?”

“Mr Rogers, you are a true gentleman.”

Mr Rogers. No longer Captain Rogers.

Before Captain America… and after?

No.

The End… For Now


End file.
